Seen this morning on the wall of the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis.

Pigeon 1: "Coo, nice house"

Pigeon 2: "It's a bit of a hole really, but it's mine."

It is reported that the market in pigeon accommodation is largely unaffected by the credit crunch, as most die before they are old enough to get a good (or even a bad) credit record.

• Tired of sitting through endless FAST trailers with banging music?
• Weary of working out non-standard DVD selection menus?
• Don't want to watch another film in an obscure language by accident?
• Not interested in 3rd rate out-takes and actor interviews?

Only £79.65 including VAT from our web site, or available to order at your local TV and radio emporium. Allow 68 days for delivery, as each is hand-crafted to order by trained bears in Bavaria.

Why not buy one for the weekend, and save all that unnecessary rage and heartache?

How many words of four or more letters can you make from this grid? Each word cannot contain the same letter more than once. All words must appear in the OED. Proper nouns, plurals, and alternative spellings of the same word, are not eligible.

Scores:
100 = you're a Sun reader, right?
1,000 = OK
2,000 = good
5,000 = excellent
10,000 = get a life, man

I've used this firm before for printing clients' stationery, and was impressed by the thoughtful way the web site is designed, so it's really easy to find out what things cost, and how to order them. I am not normally easily impressed, so this is an accolade indeed!

They have now gone up even further in my estimation. I had just uploaded the artwork for a letterhead and got an error message in the browser. Just as I was scratching my bonce wondering if it had worked, the phone rang, and a very nice lady told me she had noticed my order, and as there was a server problem, she knew I'd be unable to do the upload. She told me how to email the file instead.

How wonderful, in these days of the surly customer disservice representative, to be pleased and surprised by efficiency and initiative. Well done them.

I'm a fan of good ingredients simply cooked, so nearly snorted my beans on toast when I read this on Ceefax just now:

"Glynn Purnell cooks rabbit, pea and black olive trifle"

It is hard to believe that the reality could be worse than the vision that this phrase conjures up - but yes, it can be worse - a lot worse. Read this and vomit:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/rabbitpeaandblackoli_88473.shtml

Someone ought to be made to eat this till he explodes. That means you, Glynn with two nns.

I’ve just spent a thoroughly relaxing week-end with my Mum in Dorset and naturally, saw my co-author whilst there. I expressed the guilt I felt not having made any recent contributions to the SB, purely because I have absolutely nothing of note or interest to convey. This situation has arisen mainly because nothing exciting or interesting has occurred since our return from LA – merely sleeping, eating and working really and that just doesn’t provide the material for inclusion in a blog, or not one with which I (or my sis) would care to be associated, anyway.

However, there is an association whose sole purpose is to be as boring as possible, and as you might imagine, it has a large membership. I have resisted joining the Boring Brigade Blog so far in the vain hope that life will become so unexpectedly, coruscatingly and all-absorbingly interesting that I shall provide the inspiration for a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel or no longer be eligible for membership of the Boring Brigade at the very least. Come to think of it, BTB’s heroines normally commence upon their upward struggle in their youth, so I’ve missed that particular boat which will no doubt imminently be docking at exotic shores.

In the meantime I was hugely amused to find within a catalogue of silly ideas (one must find one’s amusement where one may) in the household pets section a slotted litter tray scoop with an integral spring in the handle. You can picture clods of animal waste catapulted into light fittings, shoes, behind domestic appliances or, if you’re really accurate, into the bin. I suppose they must have road-tested the thing, unless they apply BA ‘management’ standards in which case someone might be suing Kitty Klusters for an optically health-contrary clod in the eye.

There, a successful posting about nothing of any real relevance to anybody. I think I should take up being a sports commentator.

The only way I can justify my transatlantic flight (feebly) is to say that we had a sort of symbiotic holiday in which we went to look after a good friend’s house which contained seven cats, a rabbit and four fish tanks, while she travelled to Dublin in order to celebrate the new year. Unconvinced? Hmm, I see your point.

Los Angeles. Where to start? Vast beyond imagining – 46,000 square miles we were told, the product of eighty cities expanding and merging, and containing nine million vehicles. The message about curbing profligacy has surely not reached those shores yet. Reaching anywhere involves a lengthy car journey on particularly noisy roads as they are all surfaced with concrete (as tarmac would melt in the summer temperatures), thus we didn’t venture out an awful lot as it was not intended to be a driving holiday anyway.

We did however visit Pasadena (I just love that name!) and took in the Norton Simon museum (which I keep needing to call the Homer Simpson) – quite small, fearfully tasteful, and it contained some amazing originals including Van Gogh, Renoir (a spectacularly talented fellow IMHO) and Degas, although he seemed to have gone rather overboard with his horse and ballerina figurines. I can just imagine Mrs Degas heaving a sigh as he produced ever more things to dust. They had a fair few Rodin sculptures there too, including the Thinker.

The stark contrast between the astonishing talent of real painters (the way they managed to depict folds of fabric and skin tones never fails to inspire me) and the artless dross displayed in the ‘modern artists’ wing is astounding, although that woman with her elastic (see below) hadn’t got there at the time of visiting.

Los Angeles had a mere four inches of rain last year, an inch of which probably fell over two nights while we were there, but other than that, the weather was mostly warm and sunny, akin to an early autumn day in the UK and reaching the high 70’s on a couple of days. Glorious. In the garden by the front door of the house in which we stayed is a lemon tree laden with fruit (and this is in winter), and apparently the fruit literally cooked on the tree during the hottest part of the summer. Difficult to imagine.

BA cancelled our flight back without warning which, on the other hand, is entirely possible to imagine. A letter of complaint has been sent, not so much about the cancellation, for these things happen, but more about the abysmal attitude of their staff after the event.

We don’t expect anything to change.

This post is about a tiny moment - a tipping point from comfort to mild despair that you may also have experienced.

Picture the scene: you are lying all cosy under the duvet in the predawn dark, listening to the rain splattering on the windows, feeling smug.

Then you realise that in a few minutes, you are going to have to get up and wash and dress in the gloom, and even once the sun has allegedly risen, it will still be dim and grey till dusk. All the cosiness flees, and the pleasure in listening to the rain evaporates.

"Stretching Stretch

Thursday 31 January 6pm - 8pm at Bridport Arts Centre"

This extract from the Marshwood Vale Magazine events section illustrates what I find so annoying about some modern art: you need a whole screed of text to explain it, and by the end, you still haven't the faintest as to what you will see. Funnily enough, the event has been 'cancelled due to unforseen circumstances': perhaps the elastic gave out? What a fine metaphor for real life: drawers drooping around ankles!

Well – he could afford to, after winning the Turner Prize yesterday. A self-styled conceptual artist, his ‘works’ range from the mundane, through the trite, to the frankly unbelievably silly.

According to the BBC, one of Wallinger’s recent exploits was to “spend 10 nights alone in a Berlin gallery dressed as a bear to make the resulting film, Sleeper”. All I can say is, it’s a pity he didn’t go to Khartoum and do it.

His biggest installation to date is an accurate copy of the banners, posters and paraphernalia of political protester Brian Haw's demonstration in Parliament Square. It beggars belief that someone would actually waste time and money reconstructing, in minute detail, a replica of this on the very slim premise of acute commentary. But I guess the lovely money makes it all seem worthwhile.

You really couldn’t make this pretentious stuff up!